Beware when cancelling award tickets online and do not rely on the message that your miles were automatically reinstated. On numerous occasions when I have done so the miles for only one of 3 tickets cancelled were actually reinstated despite the message. Or once in a while none of the miles are reinstated for any of the tickets, again despite the message. Checking account balance both before and after cancelling is required to detect the problem as sometimes the cancellation is not even shown in the online account history. Many miles can be lost when the award is 60K miles or more for each ticket.

Calling is then required but if calling the same day I have been told to wait till the next day as they might be reinstated later that day, but that has never happened. Always need to call at least one day later to have the mistake corrected which it appears only certain agents can handle as I have been transferred numerous times by frontline agents when calling about this.

Also on one occasion having an agent handle the cancellation still resulted in the same problem that miles were reinstated for only a single ticket out of 3 but it appears to happen less often.